Patrick Wyman
@Patrick_Wyman
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Pod: Tides of History, currently covering the Iron Age. The Pursuit of Dadliness. Book: "The Verge," on the world around 1500. pwymanusc at gmail.
Joined May 2011
Today is the day - my book “The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World,” is available everywhere! Hard copy, ebook, and of course audiobook are all out there ready to go. Get it here:
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Imagine being drunk as hell on cheap wine on a summer day in ancient Rome watching the chariot races, then seeing a chariot eat shit on a turn, the crowd must have been insane.
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If a police officer shoves a guy unprovoked in full view of literally thousands of spectators and cameras, then lies about it and claims he was assaulted, and his superiors back him for more than a year until the footage is released, imagine what they do when nobody’s watching.
Masai Ujiri's legal team has released this body camera footage of his encounter with a sheriff's deputy as he tried to walk onto the court at Oracle Arena after the Raptors won the 2019 NBA Finals. (via @diamond83)
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I can't stress this enough: From the top down, if the people responsible for today's events face no consequences for what they've done, the next time will be much worse. If a political line is crossed, either enforce its existence or accept that the line no longer exists.
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I’m sorry but the economy doesn’t work like a blood sacrifice, the gods don’t grant a bull market just because you condemn hundreds of thousands of people to a painful death.
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If a politician has done some shitty things, like sexually harass women, they can simply be replaced with somebody who doesn't sexually harass women. Politicians are completely and utterly replaceable, though of course they'll try to tell you they're indispensable leaders.
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Imagine pissing away a lifetime bag of money as a face of one of the most popular franchises in the world because you won't stop comparing yourself to a persecuted Holocaust victim on social media, just an incredible self-own.
BREAKING: Lucasfilm fires Gina Carano from The Mandalorian after “abhorrent and unacceptable” social media posts.
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I spent the better part of a decade thinking about the end of the Roman Empire and what it felt like to live through that, in all its various manifestations - the collapse of political authority, spreading pandemics, economic crises - and now it all makes a lot more sense.
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The point of the Postal Service isn’t to make a profit and it’s a sign of how absolutely broken our public discussion of the topic is that it seems impossible to frame the issue in other terms.
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I don’t know if Biden will win in November but I think we should just take a second to laugh at the morbid hilarity of the guy who helped make sure younger voters can’t discharge student debt trying to get those people to vote for him.
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Ginsburg dying feels line one of those points where we’re all forced to explicitly grapple with how broken huge pieces of our political system are.
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Having seen the eclipse I can see why I - a late Neolithic farmer - would give some of my agricultural surplus to a hereditary class of priests who can predict these things in advance and handle any cosmological complications.
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I miss sports. I wonder what we could do to bring them back. Germany and South Korea are bringing sports back. What did they do? Oh, they used a robust public policy response to contain the pandemic and now there are sports again? No lessons to be drawn from that, I guess.
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Ted Cruz’s defining feature, the whole reason he exists as both a person and a political figure, is to be a useless shit-poster in the endless culture war; he has no real principles or allegiance, and he’s entirely empty aside from the endless maw of ambition inside him.
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Lot of folks out there confuse "history" with "stories from the past that make me feel good about who I am in the present." Most of the time, when somebody's whining about "rewriting history," what they mean is "this knowledge about a real thing that happened makes me feel bad.".
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The thing about being a wannabe authoritarian who relies on projecting strength at others' expense is that when something bad happens to you, it's pretty hard to garner sympathy because you've made sympathy for others a sign of weakness.
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Reading about ancient cannabis use and apparently Scythians invented the practice of hotboxing by burning psychoactive hemp on hot coals, sometimes in a wagon. That rules.
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I seem to recall very similar incidents being met with tear gas, pepper spray, and batons a few months back because they were “blocking traffic,” and I can’t quite figure out why these ones are treated differently, what an incredible unsolved mystery.
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As somebody who just wrote a book chapter on Columbus: he was a dogshit person even by the standards of the late 15th century, it's gross that he's commemorated, this is awesome.
#BREAKING: overnight Christopher Columbus statue in Boston’s North End vandalized, found beheaded. 📸@pictureboston
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Watching a certain kind of Brit melt down over Biden in Ireland is so intensely satisfying, as if their presence next door was somehow benevolent instead of literally centuries of often brutal occupation and exploitation.
My cartoon Thursday @TheTimes. Where the emphasis of Blarney Biden’s visit lies. `#JoeBiden #Ireland
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Treating politicians like imaginary friends instead of public servants accountable to their constituents who have to be pressured and browbeaten into doing the right thing is one of the great pathologies of the 21st century.
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Rampant and mostly accepted tax evasion by a rapacious and uncontrolled elite is the surest sign of imperial decline.
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This language is absolutely insane - "anticipating a loss" - the Postal Service a public good, you fund it so that it performs tasks that otherwise wouldn't be done at all, like delivering mail at affordable rates to rural areas.
The U.S. Postal Service is anticipating a loss of $13 billion in revenue this fiscal year due to the coronavirus crisis and another $54 billion in losses over 10 years. But the Trump administration appears opposed to bailing it out. @hereandnow
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Anybody gonna talk about precisely how he died, what conclusions he’d come to regarding his service, or how the military dealt with his death, or nah?.
Pat Tillman left the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army after 9/11. He turned down a $3.6M contract offer at 25 years old. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan 17 years ago today. RIP.
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Political systems are built of norms and institutions - beliefs about what constitutes acceptable behavior, through which channels, by which methods. They're not self-maintaining. Laws don't enforce themselves.
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One of history’s great lessons is that you don’t have to be profoundly evil to do terrible things; stupidity and apathy are more than enough, and almost always a better explanation.
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Love trying to get a 2.5-year-old to eat a quesadilla and being treated like a hated medieval tax collector instead of the person literally proving delicious, life-giving sustenance.
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“Never quit.” Hell no, you should absolutely quit pretty much anything if it sucks, you don’t enjoy it, the pay is shit, or you have better options.
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Shouting this from the rooftops until my goddamned voice is hoarse: Crises, like pandemics, don't break things in and of themselves; they show you what's already broken.
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This is almost word for word what they said in Northern Ireland when the British Army arrived. Worked out great for everybody, I heard.
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Watching Nate Silver's transformation from data-driven analyst to exactly the kind of inane, run-of-the-mill pundit he built his reputation on attacking is beyond hilarious.
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Big “empire can’t fail, it can only be failed” vibes coming out of the wanting to remain in Afghanistan crowd.
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The basic political fact at play right now is that if this is really the best the Dems can do, because of Manchin/Sinema/structural constraints, then there's something deeply wrong with the system that's creating these bottlenecks.
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If only there were a word to describe this kind of thing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without food or water.
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Given the speed with which Afghanistan's government has fallen apart after the American withdrawal, maybe we should rethink our past actions as "running a client state" instead of fighting an ongoing war of support for a friendly but beleaguered government.
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If you’re ever looking for incontrovertible proof that the world is unfair, the fact that Kissinger is turning 100 and gets articles like this written about him by fawning journalist dipshits instead of burning in hell or sitting in a cell is all you need to see.
Henry Kissinger turns 100 years old tomorrow and his son reflects on the secrets of his longevity. Hint: It's not the diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel.
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Processes of breakdown happen very slowly and imperceptibly. They're mostly aggregates small things: taxes not getting collected here, bridges not getting repaired there, things like that. Then, in a moment of crisis, the sheer level of decay becomes clear. You see the aggregate.
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My whole day has been thrown off by learning that Kumail Nanjiani is ridiculously jacked now.
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If an 87-year-old jurist was holding together a fragile piece of the political order, you’re not in great shape in the first place!.
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I've essentially stopped talking and writing about American politics since January 6th of last year because I don't think any amount of historical perspective - the thing I can actually offer - is going to change anybody's mind or alter the path we're on.
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If you're going to hire condottieri to fight your wars, make sure you're keeping them happy: lessons from 15th-century Italy that apparently Russia hasn't learned.
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A lot of the national conversation right now seems to be revolving around whether people who have chosen to believe damaging lies that aren't true should be catered to and treated with kid gloves or whether they should be treated like adults who can handle the truth.
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For @TheAtlantic, I wrote about the salt-of-the-earth millionaires who make up America's local gentry, and how their economic and political clout shapes American politics and society.
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Defenses of policing in its current form aren't actually defenses of police actions, but of a specific social order in which police shoot unarmed people, beat up protesters, and get away with it because a subset of Americans really like and want to maintain that social order.
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If I had Elon Musk Money I’d buy a nice house on Maui and smoke weed on a veranda overlooking the ocean and never think about anything stressful again but that’s probably why I don’t have Elon Musk money.
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Not sure why this is even a discussion but by any reasonable historical or comparative standard Michael Bloomberg is literally the definition of an oligarch.
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Big “Mike Francesa caller with Mets opinions” energy here.
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Yeah no shit financial markets are rigged, because all markets are rigged, because markets are human inventions and not some natural state of affairs handed down by God and an economist.
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Imagine how much corrupt, illegal stuff somebody has to do as a rich white dude in the United States to have the FBI come after you - it’s like start an opioid epidemic, poison an entire city, try a coup level of stuff.
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I watched “The Last Duel” last night and it’s the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of the true bro-energy of a medieval knight - real dull, meathead vibes.
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If you can’t hold a president responsible for fomenting an insurrection - the mechanism and political will just doesn’t exist - then it wasn’t so much an insurrection as a legitimate way of pursuing a political goal. That’s where we’re at.
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Would you say you’re looking for some “Lebensraum”.
Tucker Carlson: "This is becoming a crowded country and crowded countries are ugly, unhappy countries."
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There are a lot of downsides to living in what’s effectively a gerontocracy but the biggest one is the fact that the people making decisions were shaped by dramatically different circumstances and concerns that really aren’t operative right now.
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"Friends" reunion is low-hanging fruit; make the "Frasier" reunion episode where Frasier has become a scientific racist and does painful ad reads for Black Rifle Coffee Company you cowards.
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Every state and society faces problems and challenges, both natural and man-made. The key thing is the capacity for dealing with them. We don’t have that capacity right now.
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I'm increasingly convinced that everything happening in the United States these days is downstream of two decades of obviously failed imperial wars that have happened with the bipartisan buy-in of the political class. We've never reckoned with them in any meaningful way.
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"Western Civilization" is mostly peasants and agricultural laborers doing grueling, thankless work for their social superiors under greater or lesser amounts of explicit oppression.
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Twitter has many faults as a platform but it should be commended for giving people like this - a whole generation of pundits and fake smart people who benefited from never facing feedback- the opportunity to show the whole world their ass, and then refuse to log off afterward.
@WayneAllenJones Who exactly is saying black lives don’t matter? Without philosophical and ideological context, it’s a platitude at best. The context is atheism, postmodernism and profound attempt to destroy liberal democracy.
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Impossible to overstate what a complete moron you are if you believe this or anything adjacent to it.
Mike Johnson: “The fall of Rome” happened because they “condoned” gay people
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I say this as a historian of the Roman Empire but please for the love of god read about something other than Rome and use that for some better historical parallels.
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The Supreme Court is a structural problem, and it requires structural solutions, which the people responsible for providing are unable to formulate because they a) don’t recognize the structural nature of the issue and b) don’t know how to wield power to fix it even if they did.
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It’s so cool that no pundit or policy-maker has faced any consequences for being disastrously wrong about really important stuff for two decades, I can’t possibly imagine how that would have a toxic effect on public trust in government or key institutions.
Check out this absolutley insane 2002 column about Afghanistan 🇦🇫 from the @Nytimes' Nicholas Kristof.
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Nobody requisitions funds to repair a road. An aqueduct breaks and nobody fixes it. A port silts up and nobody builds new docks. Nobody updates the tax registers. All of the sudden, your capacity to deal with any sort of major problem - your resilience - is gone.
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WHEN WE TALK ABOUT “THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE” THAT’S REALLY SHORTHAND FOR DESCRIBING A NUMBER OF PROCESSES RANGING FROM DE-URBANIZATION AND DEPOPULATION COMBINED WITH MIGRATION AND POLITICAL CHANGE TO LONG-TERM SHIFTS IN PATTERNS OF TRADE AND CONSUMPTION IN DIFFERENT PLACES
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A key administrative official was replaced by a feckless political appointee. That official didn't push to collect tax revenues. When a drought struck and famine ensued, they didn't have the funds to import grain. And so on.
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History should make you feel uncomfortable. Lots of bad things have happened. The past doesn't exist to validate your sense of who you are in the present. People did evil things, heroic things, mundane things, bizarre things, and it's not about you.
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I wrote an op-ed in the local newspaper when I was 18 arguing that the Iraq War was going to be a disaster and the paper got multiple letters to the editor hollering that I shouldn’t have been allowed to write it.
Not that anyone asked but Fall 2001-Spring 2003 was the worst climate for free speech in America in my lifetime and nothing since really comes close.
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Jim Nantz and Tony Romo exchanging a heartfelt “I love you” at the end of that game is the kind of normalization of male emotion we should be stoked to see. Tell your bros you love them.
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Lmao always remember that as an employee you’re nothing but a line item on a budget sheet and you owe your employer absolutely nothing, because they sure as shit won’t feel obliged to do anything for you.
this is literally just capitalists admitting they don’t support a free labor market lmao
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Please read a fucking book, just one, it’s not hard and I promise you’ll learn something you didn’t know before.
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Anybody want to tell them?.
ICE agents complain about Nazi comparisons, say they're only enforcing the laws
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Oh, so it's a COUP coup.
BREAKING: A source tells me The Defense Department has just denied a request by DC officials to deploy the National Guard to the US Capitol.
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If you don't like the stuff that's happened in the last several years, the easiest way to guarantee that we'll get more of it in the future is refusing to investigate, prosecute, or otherwise hold responsible the people who did it.
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Ah yes, the exceptionally short period of human history leading to the present must be the culmination of all of human evolution. Exactly the quality of Take we’ve come to expect from one of the human embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
@TheStalwart That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution.
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This feels very much like a “frog doesn’t realize how hot the boiling water is getting” situation.
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A few months ago, I wrote about how police use violence not to enforce the law but to enforce a specific kind of social order:
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In a society that wasn't absolutely convinced that any story about work has to be told from the perspective of ownership, this would be a great reminder that. businesses can pay higher wages in order to attract employees, who are also actors with agency in the labor market.
Dale's Diner in Waterville, Ohio, closed last week. More customers than anytime in its 10-year history. The problem? No applicants for its many job openings.
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Nothing punctures your tough-guy bubble like getting into an altercation with two guys who are very obviously wrestlers in a bar bathroom. You think a piss floor is going to faze someone who's spent time on a wrestling mat? They were born to the filth.
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If your sense of self is contingent on a belief in the unimpeachable righteousness of your chosen ancestors, real or mythical, then I'd say that's a pretty fragile sense of self.
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Not having to live in a political world that caters to third-generation car dealership owners, fast-food franchisees, construction-company heirs, and all the rest of the multimillionaires who make up the backbone of our local gentry would be nice.
@Patrick_Wyman You just had an election without a Clinton, Bush or Biden. What more do you want?.
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A slapstick comedy about the first guy on the Eurasian steppe who tried to climb onto a horse's back while all his buddies were telling him what a stupid idea it was.
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All that bullshit about “this isn’t who we are,” and here we are again, but more convincingly this time. It’s exactly who we are! Read this country’s actual history, not the pretend version that makes you feel warm and fuzzy, and the through-line is pretty obvious.
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Wishing For a Good King as the limit of one's political imagination is such a deeply hilarious pathology to put out there for everyone to see.
What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry, and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life.
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Love living in a country where some people have a definition of “freedom” so expansive that it’s inseparable from genuine psychopathy.
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This was always going to end with the conclusion that old rules about the behavior of political actors in our system no longer apply: The gap between incentives and the mechanisms available to stop bad actors is too wide. The structures are just cracked at a foundational level.
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One of the great benefits of reading back about the early American republic is how you realize that basically every tension that threatens the US now has been baked in since the very beginning.
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This is such a revealing viewpoint of a certain type of center-left pundit. It effectively ignores the composition of the judiciary, state-level governance, laws and regulations that structure markets, labor, and the whole forever war thing.
This is a common view on the left but it’s just not true. The right has lost as much, and arguably far more, than it’s won. Obamacare is law. Gay marriage is a right. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have grown in scale and generosity.
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Living in the US right now is like sitting along the fault line between tectonic plates and just feeling them constantly grinding up against each other, feeling the warning quakes and waiting for the big one.
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I'm a firm believer that our political discourse will be dramatically improved by anybody and everybody telling shitty politicians to get fucked; the medium - email, Twitter, etc. - is less important than the message, IMO.
Don’t criticize #China or express support for law enforcement to @espn. It makes them real mad @Outkick
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Students learn more and better when they’re engaged and interested, and nothing makes them more excited to be in a classroom than knowing its sole purpose is to turn them into labor for businesses that will squeeze them for productivity while paying them as little as possible.
Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.
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The Confederacy were the bad guys. Defeating a bunch of slave-owning dipshits and remaking the country as a multiracial democracy is one of the two greatest things the United States has ever done. Defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japan is the other.
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I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Deadspin, which gave me incredible opportunities that allowed me to have the career I have today, but the biggest thing I learned from them is that it’s okay to tell someone powerful and shitty to get fucked.
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The best regional cuisine in the United States is New Mexican, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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The foundational fantasy of American politics is that somebody is coming to save you. Nobody’s coming. You’re stuck.
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